Jennifer Egan
Jennifer Egan
Jennifer Eganis an American novelist and short story writer who lives in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. Egan's novel A Visit from the Goon Squad won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth7 September 1962
CountryUnited States of America
block writing thinking
I haven't had writer's block. I think it's because my process involves writing very badly.
women home needed
Being somewhere but not completely: that was home for Danny. . . . All he needed was a cellphone or I-access, or both at once, or even just a plan to leave wherever he was and go someplace else really really soon.
hard-work winning fiction
There's something very strange about associating me with that prize. I had hoped for it in a more directed way as a journalist. Somehow as a journalist you know there are Pulitzers out there and you can work hard and get one. To win it for Fiction seems unbelievable.
hard-work winning fiction
There's something very strange about associating me with that prize. I had hoped for it in a more directed way as a journalist. Somehow as a journalist you know there are Pulitzers out there and you can work hard and get one. To win it for Fiction seems unbelievable.
memories past thinking
I find myself thinking more about the past as I get older... maybe because there's just more of it to think about. At the same time, I'm less haunted by it than I was as a younger person. I guess that's probably the ideal: to reach a point where you have access to all of your memories, but you don't feel victimized by them.
book squad usual
I felt more doubtful than usual with 'Goon Squad,' because I knew that the book's genre wasn't easily named - Novel? Stories? Novel-in-stories? - and I worried that its lack of a clear category would count against it. My hopes for it were pretty modest.
writing trying worst
I am at my worst trying to write about things that overlap with my life.
ideas intellectual needs
I don't really know where my ideas come from. I start with a time and a place. That's what I need to get started, and an intellectual question.
adversity resistance persons
I'm a dogged person. I respond to adversity with a steely resistance.
writing opposites way
That adage about 'Write what you know' is basically the opposite of the way I function. I write about what I'm curious to find out.
effort lines firsts
The bottom line is that I like my first drafts to be blind, unconscious, messy efforts; that's what gets me the best material.
reading writing way
We live in a moment and a culture when reading is really endangered. There's simply no way to write well, though, if you're not reading well.
writing stuff regularity
Because you can't write habitually and well all the time, you have to be willing to write badly. That's how you get the regularity that enables you to be present for the good stuff.
strong writing character
But I always need to identify with a character to write about him or her - and by 'identify,' I mean see the world through that person's eyes and have a strong sense of the inner logic of their acts and decisions, wacky or wrongheaded though they might be. In that sense, I think there's some of me in all of them.